Drop OffReview

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Don't follow this bouncing ball.

By Lucas M. Thomas

A possessed young woman falls into a coma and dreams of endless piles of attacking fruit. Her boyfriend, using the magic of a helpful fairy, enters into the citrus nightmare to do battle with the approaching produce &#Array; by assaulting it with a racquetball. Welcome to the latest nonsensical Virtual Console release to be brought forth from the depths of the TurboGrafx-16 catalog, 953417.html" target="_new">Drop Off. It's rich in Vitamin C.

Drop Off is a clone of Breakout. Breakout was itself, of course, a different take on the concept of Pong, meaning the creative inspiration for this title is almost as old as the very medium of video games. It plays like it too. Drop Off tries to do a few new things, and there's no questioning that it is, indeed, "different" &#Array; but it just feels archaic. Outdated.

The bouncing ball mechanic is where most of that feeling lives, and where most of this design is based. You begin a stage in Drop Off faced with an open playing field, and the ball launches off your circular paddle. It starts ricocheting off the walls of the well, and off of your paddle, as the first pieces of fruit begin to descend from the top of the screen. The goal is to eliminate the threat &#Array; one apple, watermelon, or kumquat at a time &#Array; while keeping the ball from missing your paddle too often and creating, then falling through, a hole in the bottom of the pit.

All very similar to Breakout so far, but there are a few differences. The first is in your paddle's movement &#Array; you're not restricted to just shifting left or right, but you can instead surf around the entire screen in any direction. Destroying the fruit pieces is also a bit altered, as if you take out the links holding a chain together above, the unsupported individuals below will also be eliminated. (That's more like Bust-a-Move.)

These two altered elements end up adding to the annoyance of playing Drop Off, though. The free control of the paddle is a good idea in theory, but the circular shape of your paddle cursor makes it hard to know how the ball will ricochet off when you make contact. If you make contact. The collision detection on the paddle seems much smaller than the sprite itself. The B Button (or 1 on the Wiimote) will change the rebound angle of the ball off the paddle, allowing you to switch between more vertical or more horizontal bounces &#Array; but that, too, is just odd, and seems to defeat the entire idea of having a ricocheting ball mechanic at all.

The falling fruit, too, can be a source of confusion, as it seems that sometimes colliding with the tumbling bananas or strawberries will cause you to lose a life, and other times they'll pass right through your paddle without registering damage.

Probably the biggest potentially positive difference of Drop Off is the presence of boss battles. Those aren't often seen in Breakout clones or puzzlers, and here they're an interesting, but inconsistent, element. It's nice that the normal action gets broken up every once in a while with a combat sequence against some demonic representation of the "something" that has possessed your girlfriend, but it's all just too out of place when taken together. Demons, fruit and a Breakout mechanic just can't really come together to make a cohesive experience &#Array; or, at least, one that's cohesive enough to keep your interest for more than just a few rounds of play.

The Verdict

Drop Off could drop out of the Wii Shop lineup and few people would likely complain &#Array; it's a half-hearted clone of an old design from the '70s, that was done better ... in the '70s. The new, creative elements Drop Off tries to introduce on top of Breakout's bouncing ball mechanic just don't jive together, and the mix of demonic possession, falling fruit and a chivalrous boyfriend morphed into a paddle doesn't make even a so-bad-it's-good level of sense. Save your 600 Wii Points for other, non-produce, purchases.